Here at Bay12 we excel at Theoretical Biology. Need to know the value of Merbone? Check. Need to know the density of a thrown Fluffy Wambler? Check. Need to know how a walking Mushroom can theoretically talk? Check.

Well, for me it's endless possibilities for different playstyles, experimenting with the world and your fortress, challenging yourself. Deep involvement with stories of individual dwarves, which can be quite fascinating sometimes. Also, the ever-evolving nature of the game. And when you're tired of it, you can just build shit.

The stories and meaning people make out of a few inexplicable engravings of cheese, some very misguided and thirsty dwarf deciding to quench their thirst with magma, and epic sagas about soapmakers with spoons.

Its a already great and funny game with a greater scope for storytelling off-screen as well as on it (in literally transcribing a bunch of symbols 'talking' and 'fighting' with each other).

It's got to be the depth and the emergent story telling. The sheer love and depth that has gone into DF makes it so that you get that proper feel of a novel, and of an epic (an unusual and normally exclusive feels), of you witnessing moments in a living world. The worlds of DF are living in a manner that no other game has been able to match, from the stone layers to the tissue layers, from the personalities to the history, or even the great ecosystems and all the ways the great chain of causality affects gameplay. It's fucking beautiful to say the least, how much everything comes into consideration on every level of decision making. Before you make your first embark, thousands of years of history, millions of years of erosion, mineral deposition and other details of world generation have informed your decision to embark with seven Dwarves in that cliffside rich in limestone and limonite, within range of the world's civilizations.